Traffic lights tell you when your Xbox Live friends are gaming

It sounds like [Andrew] is trying to build a Pavlovian response into his behavior when it comes to online gaming. He wants to make sure he doesn’t miss out when all his friends are online, so he built this traffic signal to monitor Xbox Live activity. It will illuminate the lights, and drive the meters differently based on which of his friends are currently online. When the light’s green, he drops everything a grabs a controller.

The base of the light is a black project box. Inside you’ll find the Arduino compatible chip which drives the device mounted on a piece of protoboard. A WIZnet W5100 adds network connectivity at the low price of around $25. There is one problem with the setup. The API which [Andrew] found doesn’t use any authentication. This means that he can only see the public status of his friends; anyone who has set their online status set to private will always register as ‘online’. If you know of an existing Xbox Live API that would solve this issue we’d love to hear from you in the comments.

HaD, stay away from mentioning things you don’t understand. A Pavlovian response (Classical Conditioning) is when you introduce a stimuli (stimuli 1) for association with an unconditioned stimuli (stimuli 2) that already triggers a response, you do this enough so that conditioned stimuli (stimuli 1) can cause the response that was for the unconditioned stimuli (stimuli 2) through assocation of both stimuli. This is more of and indicator than anything else. Please not that I mean no offense by this, just warning you to stay in familiar territory.

Of course if hackaday didn’t wade into unfamiliar territory you(and often others) wouldn’t had the opportunity inform those of use who may have used the tern Pavlovian Response” incorrectly. I have to admit it didn’t sink in until I read the Wikipedia article on the subject